The writer of the children’s classic Stig of the Dump

Clive King, who has died Clive

aged 94, wrote 16 books King

for children, but is chiefly 1924-2018

remembered for one of them. Stig of the Dump – about a boy who finds a caveman living in the bottom of a chalk pit – had been rejected by 12 publishers when it was picked up by Kaye Webb at Puffin. Published in 1963, with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, it was an instant hit in what is now considered a golden age for British children’s publishing. It has never been out of print since, said The Times, and has sold two million copies.

Clive King was born in 1924, and grew up in the North Downs of Kent, where – with his brothers – he spent happy hours exploring an old chalk pit at the end of the garden, said The Daily Telegraph. At his infant school, one Miss Brodie entranced him with tales from Puck of Pook’s Hill and stories of the Stone Age. Later, he would talk of wanting to find “something primitive and elemental” to awaken the quiet village of Ash where he lived, and where he brought up two of his children (the models for Barney and Lou in Stig). He wrote stories at school and read English at Cambridge, before joining the Royal Navy reserve, sailing as part of Arctic convoys and to the Far East, where he visited the devastated Hiroshima. After the War, he got a job with the British Council that took him all over the world. Most of his books were based on his travels: his first, Hamid of Aleppo, was about a Syrian golden hamster; The 22 Letters was set in the Mediterranean in the 15th century; and Ninny’s Boat was inspired by the Vietnamese boat people he’d met in Pakistan. But it was Stig, rooted in King’s childhood and evoking a lost rural world where children could roam free, that really caught the public’s imagination. Stig’s success did not make King rich, but it enabled him to write full-time, latterly from an old cottage in Norfolk. As for the chalk pit in Ash, it is no more: it was filled in to create a golf course. “I’ve not been back for a long time,” he told The Guardian in 2013. “I don’t want to go back.”